As Population Growth Slows, Populism Surges

Mr. Auerswald is an associate professor at George Mason University’s school of policy and government. Mr. Yun is the founder of the Palo Alto Longevity Prize.

May 22, 2018

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Supporters of the Five Star Movement at a rally in Rome in March.CreditCreditAlessandra Benedetti/Corbis, via Getty Images

Nicola Gatta, the mayor of Candela in southeastern Italy (population 2,700), is desperate to reverse two decades of population decline and literally keep his town on the map. If you accept his invitation to move there, he will pay you about $2,300.

It’s probably no coincidence that mayors in small Italian towns are making such offers at about the same time as a populist coalition is on the verge of taking over Italy’s government.

The last time that populism — what we broadly define as political movements that ostensibly set the interests of “ordinary people” against elites as well as an “other” — swept across Europe and the United States was marked by the same combination of slow economic and fertility growth that today prevails in advanced industrialized countries in the West and Asia.

Economies have recently picked up some steam, but not before nearly a decade of sluggish economic growth — and, in most of the world, declining fertility rates. The United States is no exception: The fertility rate among Americans has hit a 30-year low.

The shift from global population growth toward population decline is emerging as one of the least appreciated forces that is, along with urbanization and digital disruption, upending the political and economic status quo.

In the world’s largest cities, where populations are densely concentrated and growing, economies are generally thriving and cosmopolitanism is embraced. Where populations are sparse or shrinking, usually in rural places and small cities, economies are often stagnant, and populism sells.

Why does it hold such appeal in these places? Nativist, nationalist rhetoric — “Make America (or Whatever Other Country) Great Again” — appeals because it promises to restore the rightful economic and cultural stature of “common people” in relation to a decadent urban intelligentsia. In Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Thailand and Turkey, populism has been fed by the juxtaposition of rural population and economic decline against the growth and increasing prosperity of the largest cities.

The trend toward population decline, set off by a sustained decrease in fertility rates beginning in the 1960s, has been driven to a significant extent by increasing prosperity and life span. As people get wealthier, live longer and move to cities, the overall rate at which they produce babies tends to decline.

When fertility rates get low enough, it’s only a matter of time before population levels start to decrease. We have heard about the seemingly exceptional story of Japan’s steady depopulation and economic deflation. But the trend toward population decline is not limited to Japan and a few East European countries.

The fact is that all of East Asia, all of Europe, and all of North America are experiencing birthrates that are below replacement level — which means, simply, were it not for immigration and longer life spans, all of these regions would be experiencing year-to-year population decline.

Iran, Brazil and other emerging-market countries are on this list as well. Fertility rates are falling rapidly in India, the world’s most populous country after China.

Only the African continent is poised for significant population growth in coming decades.

Now if you’re reading this and you live in any one of the world’s 500 largest cities, you probably have little personal awareness of the imminent onset of global population decline. That’s because the entirety of the increase in global population outside of the African continent is already being captured by those 500 largest cities with populations of over one million people. In other words, with the significant exceptions of the African continent and the less-than-half-a-percent of the planet’s habitable surface covered by the world’s 500 largest cities, the earth is today experiencing net population decline.

In the past decade people in rural, remote places have been disproportionately losing not just jobs and opportunities, but people, elementary schools and confidence in the future. Consider Clarksburg, W.Va., a town that once was a major glass producer. It has lost much of its productive capacity, including people — the population is 16,000, down from a post-World War II peak of over 30,000. Ordinary amenities taken for granted in big cities are all but absent. The writer Sam Quinones told us, after a recent visit to Clarksburg, “I found a coffee shop with Wi-Fi eventually, but it closed at 5:30 p.m.” Against such a backdrop of general decline, populists’ promises to revive dead or dying local industries are understandably welcome.

As youth have continued to migrate from rural areas to cities, their movement has widened not only the median age gap between rural places and cities, but also gaps in attitude, since the young, regardless of where they live, tend to associate more with urban outlooks.

Election data from the past two years plainly describe the consequences of these demographic dynamics: Most advanced industrialized countries are dominated by two competing political movements that either awkwardly inhabit the bodies of existing political parties or create new ones more to their liking. One movement extols the values that are a practical necessity in dense, interconnected cities: interdependence, internationalism and the embrace of “diversity” (defined along multiple dimensions). Another movement extols the equally necessary virtues of people in rural areas: self-reliance, autonomy and the embrace of immediate community and place.

In the Brexit vote, 84 percent of the voting districts in England’s largest cities (London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds) voted to remain in the European Union, while 87 percent of those in rural areas voted to leave.

A consistent theme is the relative decline of native-born populations in relation to immigrants. In the United States, according to the Migration Policy Institute, the immigrant share of the population increased from 5.4 percent in 1960 to 13.5 percent in 2016, while in parallel the fertility rate halved, going from 3.6 to 1.8 births per woman overall.

Only Japan, the country most identified with population decline, appears to have resisted the current populist wave — arguably either because its restrictive immigration policies immunize its native-born population from fears of demographic obsolescence, or because it already experienced a populist surge, with disappointing results, when the tradition-breaking Democratic Party of Japan was voted into power in 2009.

As reassuring as it is for us in America to view our politics in narrowly domestic terms or for our friends elsewhere to do the same, populist surges are, curiously, among the most wholly internationalist of contemporary political phenomena. Where populations decline, populists arise — more often than not, promising to reverse history and restore past glory if not demographic dominance.

In an age when the internet has collapsed distance and artificial intelligence threatens to supplant human intelligence in one domain after another, the density of people in places turns out to matter more than ever.

If there is one country that has been in the vanguard of both demographic decline and the political exploitation of the frustrations it engenders, it is neither Japan nor any of the countries just discussed. Rather, it is a country whose population began to shrink 15 years before Japan’s; a country whose leader declared in a 2006 address to the nation that the demographic crisis was “the most acute problem” facing his land; a country in which the battle between the rural “narod” (the common people) and the urban intelligentsia was a defining feature of political life for most of a violent century. That country is, of course, the Russian Federation, and the leader who expressed this concern is Vladimir Putin.

Population decline is here, but unevenly distributed. When it comes to the politics of the 21st century, that geographical unevenness makes all the difference.